January 03, 2006

In their brilliant Blue Ocean Strategy, INSEAD authors Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne present their basic thesis in simple terms: "Value
innovation is about making the competition irrelevant by creating
uncontested market space. We argue that beating the competition within
the confines of the existing industry is not the way to create
profitable growth."That's precisely what Mike Leach has done—and what you need to do is
read every damn word in the article .... which may be the best article
on business strategy I've ever read. Especially biz strategy for the
00s.

He is referring to an article by Michael Lewis (Moneyball) on Texas Tech's football coach that kept me up thinking half the night. Jim McGee says: Go read the article. For extra credit, go read what Peters has to say. Then put both of them down and think about it. Essentially, Mike Leach has changed the geometry, tempo and approach to talent of the game.

The way he described it, you could shift the burden by changing the law
so that Internet Service Providers would evaluate the plaintiff's
evidence, and decide themselves whether revealing the customer's
identity might be appropriate. If the decision is yes, at that point
the ISP notifies the customer, who is given the opportunity to initiate
legal proceedings to enjoin the ISP from revealing his identity.

Given the consolidation of telecom, this would empower a handful of ISPs, as in 5, to be judge and jury for revealing identity. Anonymity is a critical facet of society, and it's value is more than whistle-blowing. I wouldn't call it a right, but would call it a feature of the virtual and real worlds (we don't walk around with name-tags). Regardless of how you value anonymity, you should agree that this would:

create undue costs for ISPs,

privatize governance and enforcement,

create undue legal costs for consumers, which

could lead to infringements on civil liberties, because

customers would be guilty until proven innocent.

Now, if the ISP or legal action revealed the libelous party it would resolve Seigenthaler's complaint against Wikipedia.

Beyond this attempt to weaken anonymity on the Net, Wikipedia's open nature is also under attack. Adam Curry edited podcasting history in his favor. Big deal. It's a wiki, just edit it if you disagree and let the community's practice work over time.

Consider regulating against graffiti. You have two options:

Guard every wall in town to prevent the infraction from occurring

Paint over infractions and enforce the law by chasing down perpetrators

The former is not just prohibitively expensive, it kills creativity and culture. The later is the status quo and generally works, especially where communities flourish.

So what would have Wikipedia do? Lock down contributions through a fact checking process with rigid policy? Or let people contribute, leverage revision history and let the group revert infractions.

Social media is disruptive. The role of regulation significantly impacts how society will manage transition. Today much of media is regulated through complaints (e.g. indecency). It only takes one horror story for us to loose freedom of anonymous speech. The easiest and most dangerous way to curb social media is to have it conform to mainstream models.

UPDATE: Cnet has a pretty good article on the liability reform sought by Seigenthaler, the first argument I made. Mitch Ratcliffe takes issue with my second argument, about how a wiki works and how best to regulate it. Mitch, you keep trying to fit Wikipedia into your model of how an encyclopedia should be instead of recognizing how it is different. A print version of Wikipedia should have an editorial process bolted on to emergent practice, as it is a comparable product, frozen in time. But instead, the evolving nature of Wikipedia needs to be recognized and celebrated for what it is. Help people understand what it is, not what it is not.

FURTHER: Doc Searls on the first argument, "Identity without anonymity is like math without zero."

October 31, 2005

Many of you already know Jonas Luster, known quantity in open source and social software, who just joined Socialtext as our Open Source Community Facilitator.

Jonas has played an active role in OSS projects including Apache, mod_ruby and Drupal. He is has worked with Lycos, CollabNet, Technorati and Blizzard Entertainment. He got his doctorate in Social Psychology and Criminology from the University of Amsterdam, and is an occasional guest lecturer at UofA.

We could think of no one better to work the community and make it fun at the same time.

October 28, 2005

The whole Socialtext team is in town for an on-site retreat next week, so we are having this month's Wiki Wednesday in Palo Alto. Some great suprise guests are coming by. Mark the date and sign up on the wiki.

Also, a few of us are coming to TagCamp this weekend. Unfortunately it overlaps with the UCLA-Stanford and Earthquakes-Galaxy football games, but I'll stop by for some geek time.

September 02, 2005

First there was Mobile Monday, then Tag Tuesday, and now, behold -- Wiki Wednesday!

Next Wednesday, September 7th, it starts in 13 cities around the world, from Lubbock to London. People get together to chat, learn about wikis, find jobs, talk deals and generally cavort. Ice cream on Socialtext.

Here's the cities we have so far, precise locations are still being firmed up: London, Lubbock (looking for a second geek), Indianapolis, Palo Alto, Minneapolis, Montreal, New York City, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, Seattle, St. Louis and Toronto